It looks like a couple weeks ago I was hit with a Google algorithm change (my guess), and all my pages - that ranked on the first two SERPs - suddenly now reside on 4-5, or not at all. Obviously this kind of thing hits a lot of us from time to time, but this one puzzles me.

When I search for something like our products, I get pages that have fewer to none of the keywords I searched, and even fewer backlinks. In other words, some pretty poor pages beat mine. They are not very relevant. My pages are keyword rich for sure.

I still have a page rank of 4 (which dropped from a 5 a few months ago). I don't know if I'm being penalized for something.

I guess I don't really know what my next move should be, except to go through and keep trying to optimize for the words that my keyword research suggests. And to keep building backlinks. Your thoughts are appreciated!!!

I definitely wouldn't start panicking yet FTR. I noticed some unusual movement in Google for a couple of my "on the cusp"* sites over the past couple of weeks also. Whatever they're doing it seems like they've been waffling back and forth a bit. Where I'm seeing a particular phrase that is may normally be Page 1 for me (5-10 ranking) suddenly jump back to Page 2 or 3. Then another time I check it'll be back up there in the Top 10 again.

If you're going to do anything at all I would suggest trying to putting some effort into getting some more good quality, targeted inbound links. Not only will these help stabalize things in the short term, but in my experience they'll also help to limit such bouncing around in the future once you have a solid, diverse set of links pointing towards your site.

Keep building links, quality links. Don't worry about being penalized. If you were penalized, you wouldn't see results at all.

check this out:

 hittail dot com /blog/ 2007/ 02/ add-traffic-to-your-site dot html

It really opened my eyes to getting "long-tail", quality traffic, google analytics only tells you what you are already popular for.

Yes I've been seeing a lot of upheaval in Google's serps since mid-February.

I'm watching 16 sites, 3 of them disappeared in mid Feb, 2 bounced back a week later, one is still in the doldrums after a month.

The one thing in common with these three sites is that they have a lot of similar pages (they're online catalogue sites), the other thing is that they didn't have a redirect from non www pages eg example.com/index.htm to www .example.com/index.htm.

I'd be inclined to sit it out for now, but have a look at how your pages are being indexed in Google and see if there are any pages listed as "duplicates".

Google page rank algorithm
Inbound links
----------------- ==page rank
Outbound links

Try to get some .edu links